From the "Book of Day-Dreams"

Soul unto SOUL GLOOMS DARKLING DISGUISE upon disguise, and then disguise, Equivocations at the rose’s heart, Life’s surest pay a poet’s forgeries, The gossamer gold coinage of our art. Why hope for truth? Thy very being slips, Lost from thee, in thy crowd of masking moods. Why hope for love? Between quick-kissing lips Is room and stage for all hate’s interludes. One with thy love thou art!—her eyes, her hair Known to thy soul, a pure estate of bliss; But some least motion, look, or changëd air, And nadir unto zenith nearer is: Thou mayst control her limbs, but not begin To know what planet rules the tides within. DISENCHANTMENT THE MIGHTY soul that is ambition’s mate, Tied to the shiftings of a certain star, Forgets the circle of its mortal state And what its planetary aspects are, Till, in conjunctive course and wandering, Out of its trance and treasure-dream of hope It wakens, poor illusionary thing, Wingless, without desire, or deed, or scope. So have I with imaginations played Till I have lost life’s sure and single good, Forgotten friendships, broken vows, and made My heart a highway for ingratitude, And, driven to the desert of the sky, Fear now no thing but immortality. OR EVER THE EARTH WAS THAT which shall last for aye can have no birth. Thou art immortal! therefore thou hast been A voyage to which the journey of the earth Is but the shifting of some tawdry scene. Thou wert not absent when the camp began Of the great captains of the middle air,— Sirius and Vega and Aldebaran,— Myriads, and but the marshals numbered there; Ay, earlier yet in the God-purposed void, The dream and desert of oblivion, Thou livedst,—a thought of one to be employed Ere yet Time’s garments thou didst take and don: Guest that no footprint on my threshold leaves,— Speak, O dim traveller, speak: thy host believes! THOU LIVEST, O SOUL! THOU livest, O soul! be sure, though earth be flames, Though lost be all the paths the planets trod, Thou hast not aught to do with signs and names, With Life’s false art or Time’s brief period. Thy being wast ere yet the heavens were not, Gently thy breath the waves of ether stirred, And often hast thou feared and oft forgot, Yet knew thyself when rang the parent Word. Long hast thou played at change through chain on chain Of beings, drooping now in strange descent, Now adding bloom to bloom and beauty’s gain, Through subtle growths of glory evident. O earnest play, thyself apart oft smilest, One still at heart, that so thyself beguilest. THEN SHALL WE SEE THEN shall we see and know the group divine, The sure immortals of the world’s vague throng, Ceaseless continuers of the purple line, The equal-sceptred kings of Deed and Song: From sire to sire to Orpheus and beyond, Thrilled with the blood of Hector do they come, Blazoned on eyes believing, eyes too fond To fail to follow them unto their home. Hark! their thin tread outechoes the vast hosts That shake the valleys of the globe beneath; Their smile is fire; their eyes (O, subtle ghosts!) Have waked in me the passion of the Wreath Without whose round not heaven itself is bliss, Nor immortality immortal is.